


Waking Dream

by marmaladeSkies



Series: From Worse to Merely Bad [5]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Constructive Criticism REQUESTED, M/M, Nightmares, no beta we die like Glenn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:07:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25619350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marmaladeSkies/pseuds/marmaladeSkies
Summary: Dimitri doesn’t sleep well.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Claude von Riegan
Series: From Worse to Merely Bad [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1848643
Comments: 26
Kudos: 62





	Waking Dream

Dimitri opened his eyes.

He’d been moved in his sleep. Instead of his cell, he was in a perverse mockery of what he could have had, had Cornelia not happened to him. The room was full of shadows- a quick glance at the windows told him it was night. Moonlight filtered through around blue and silver curtains. Faerghus colors. Dimitri _tched-_ of course they had to rub it in what he’d lost.

He rose from the bed and began investigating. The walls were draped in tapestries depicting what, under the darkness, appeared to be hunting scenes. Kings and knights hunted lions. Lions hunted deer and sometimes sheep. Pheasants were released from cages to be shot down by archers. He recognized these tapestries- they’d hung in his father’s room for as long as he could remember.

Was Cornelia truly taunting him by housing him in his dead father’s room? Curse that wretched woman! Dimitri snarled and turned around, stomping away. He’d have her head for this!

He bumped into a table. Wooden. Covered in a thin cloth. On top of it, an odd game board. Two rows of long, thin triangles had been painted on it, facing each other. Black and white tokens had been haphazardly placed on the markings, with more stacked in neat grooves along the side of the board. The game had been left half-finished.

_“It’s called backgammon,”_ whispered a distant memory. _“Care to try it?”_

Dimitri shook off the memory. This was no time to get lost in thought! With a growl, he seized the board and hurled it at the wall. Game pieces and dice scattered all across the floor with a satisfying clatter.

...he shouldn’t have been able to do that. He raised his hands to look at them. Where were his shackles? His guards never touched them. Even his torturers rarely did, except for when they needed to reposition him for a new punishment. And even when they did that, they were careful to put them back on as soon as they could. Without his shackles, he was dangerous.

After a moment’s hesitation, he willed his crest into being. It came immediately, the symbol of the Crest of Blaiddyd floating over his upturned palm. No pain came with it, no fire arced across his hands and arms. 

Well. _This_ was... well, he couldn’t call it auspicious, not until he’d used it to slay Cornelia and all of her followers, burn her legacy into ashes, and retake Faerghus from the grip of the Empire. But it was getting there. Dimitri allowed himself a wolfish grin. His tormenters would regret leaving him with _this._

He needed a weapon. He didn’t see anything obvious at first glance- they hadn’t been _that_ stupid- but maybe he could take down a curtain rod and-

“Dimitri?”

He spun around. There was a ghost on the bed. “Father?” he asked, unsure. He felt silly immediately afterward. Of course it was his father. This was his father’s room, after all. Who else would be here? Glenn? One of the other retainers killed in the Tragedy?

The ghost, oddly, seemed concerned about him. “Dimitri, you’re dreaming,” said his father’s corpse. “You need to wake up.”

That made a horrible kind of sense. Dimitri was never this fortunate in the waking world. No doubt he was still in that filthy hole in the basement. But... even if this was all a dream, fake, likely to vanish soon, he didn’t want to leave. This room may be a horrible mockery of what could have been, but it was still better than a flea-infested cell guarded by mostly uncaring but occasionally hostile thugs.

“Might I stay a while longer?” he asked, tentatively. “Until they come for me?”

He regretted it at once. His ghosts were never so merciful. That they had let him sleep at all was in itself something to be grateful for- who was he to ask for more? Especially when he had already failed them so utterly. The one responsible for their deaths was still out there with her head firmly attached to her shoulders, and here he was asking for-

“Dimitri, you need to wake up,” repeated his father’s ghost.

“Father, I-”

“Dimitri, come here.”

Dimitri walked over to the bed and sat down on it. The ghost gently laid a hand on his arm, then handed him a small, amber vial. “Smell this.”

He uncorked the vial, inhaled, and immediately began coughing as an acrid, sharp scent flooded his nostrils. He pawed futilely at the stinging in his nose as the world snapped into clarity. He was in Fhirdiad Castle’s keep, not the dungeons. He hadn’t been in the dungeons for over seven years. The man holding onto him through his coughing was Claude, not an apparition.

He had been dreaming. Of course. It had been a while since his last waking dream. Had he even left the bed? He looked down, sighing.

There was a backgammon token on the ground.

“Oh no, our game!” Dimitri leapt from the bed and started scooping up game pieces. He sighed as he found the board, a large crack running down its center. It threatened to split in two entirely as he sat back down on the bed, clutching it to his chest.

“We can fix it,” said Claude weakly. Dimitri could only imagine the look that must have been on his face. That game board had been a wedding gift for the both of them from Nader- it was irreplaceable.

Dimitri couldn’t even bring himself to look at him. “I shouldn’t be king.”

“Dimitri-”

“I break everything I touch. I almost went tearing through the castle like a rabid beast, and there’s nothing that could have stopped me once I got through that door. Lord Seidel is right, I do need a _minder._ ”

“Lord Seidel is trying to cling to the power he had on your regency council. He’s not-”

“I was _looking for a weapon,_ Claude. If Areadbhar had been in here...” Areadbhar _craved_ bloodshed. Wielding it made its holder do the same. There was a reason that generations of Blaiddyds kept it locked securely in a vault when it wasn’t explicitly needed.

“Areadbhar is locked away. You take all the precautions-”

“What kind of king takes _precautions_ to avoid harming his own people?” demanded Dimitri.

“A sensible one,” countered Claude. He took one of Dimitri’s hands in his own. “Please answer me this: have you _ever_ hurt anyone during a waking dream?”

“The maid last month-”

“Was only startled. You didn’t so much as touch her. You never tried to.”

Dimitri desperately grasped for another example. “I broke Felix’s wrist.”

“That was a training accident. They happen to everyone.” Felix had taken a fall and landed in just the wrong way. Mercedes and her healing magic had only been a shout away, so no harm was done.

Dimitri frowned. “No, not _that._ During the war, just after we joined you at Garreg Mach. I- he was only trying to help me,” he explained. “I wasn’t eating well. He took me by the shoulder and tried to drag me to the dining hall, and I just-”

It was so horribly easy to just grab someone by the wrist and _twist_.

Claude was clutching his hand like he was afraid he was going to disappear if he let go. “Would you do it again?”

“Not _deliberately._ ”

“Then you’re already a lot better than some of the kings that have come and gone.”

That didn’t mean much, Dimitri wanted to say. Some of the kings that had come and gone had been tyrants. Brutes. Beasts in human guise. Instead he just sighed. He was tired. He didn’t want to argue about this, but it was so hard to get him to understand sometimes. Claude would learn how much of a monster he was in time.

Claude reached up to brush a tuft of hair out of his face. “We probably shouldn’t be talking about this in the middle of night, anyway. Come on, let’s sleep on it.”

As if he trusted himself to sleep after what had almost happened. But at least he could pretend. Lie down beside his husband and listen to Claude slowly drift off. And if he drifted off himself shortly after, then that was just another part of him he couldn’t control.

**Author's Note:**

> Have you ever woken up still convinced you were asleep? I have! It was weird.


End file.
